The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
by JustMcShane
Summary: You're Alex Rider, and you don't want to be mature, not really. You want to live in a world where you're just some dumb teenage kid with normal dumb teenage problems, where the very idea of MI6 is just a plot point in some superspy thriller movie and you never need to seriously think about people trying to kill you ever again. (for the 2019 Spyfest fic exchange)


**Notes: **For the Spyfest fic exchange prompt 'Alex suffering appendicitis after MI6 had faked an appendectomy for that gun/shot wound'. An excellent prompt – not sure how much justice I did to it! And sorry about the weird point of view, for some reason it was the only way that the story would let me write it.

I was going to do a Week 4 story also, but then my wrist flared up and then the rest of my body decided that it hated me, so that's why that isn't happening and also why this is a tiny bit late.

Title from a weirdly evocative article from the New York Times about a dude buying a bunch of goats. Look it up, it's very good.

* * *

Here's the scene: you're Alex Rider, and you're hunched over your desk at the back of the vaguely-smelling-of-mildew classroom that houses Double Maths on a Friday afternoon, trying to pay attention to the teacher while simultaneously sort of not wanting to pay attention to him at _all._ You're in that awful state of mind where all you want to do is go home and lie in bed and watch TV like a complete lazy lump, but the clock on the wall to your right kindly informs you that you've got an hour and twenty-five minutes until you can even consider doing anything like that.

You've just about resigned yourself to your grim fate when you become aware of the fact that your exhaustion isn't entirely just psychological. You feel faintly sick – or nearly sick, in that kind of narrow way that you get when you just know you're about to come down with something awful and can't do anything to stop it. It starts off as a dull ache behind your eyes, and within fifteen minutes, escalates into a full-blown migraine. And it only gets worse from there. By the time the clock tells you there's an hour left until the end of school, your stomach feels queasy and you just _know _you're going to be sick.

You raise your hand, excuse yourself to the bathroom, and practically sprint down the hallway, half doubled-over, to get there. You make it into a stall just in time to throw up so violently you nearly choke. Your vision blurs over, and you feel goosebumps break out all over your body as you hack out a cough and groan and throw up again. Acid in your mouth, throat, crawling under your skin. Pain in your chest and stomach. You press your hands to the cold tiled floor, not even caring how disgusting and grimy it must be, and let out a tiny, pained noise. You gag at the smell, and then end up vomiting again for... a while.

Eventually, you manage to pull yourself together long enough to flush the toilet and stagger out to splash your face with water. You stare yourself in the mirror, blinking, and you barely recognize yourself. It's not just because you're sick, either – there's something in your eyes that you don't really like, and you can't pin it down. Exhaustion? Probably. Maturity? You don't want to be mature, not really. You want to live in a world where you're just some dumb teenage kid with normal dumb teenage problems, where the very idea of MI6 is just a plot point in some superspy thriller movie and you never need to seriously think about people trying to kill you ever again. It's not fair. It's just not fair.

You blink again, shake it off, and manage to fumble your way through the hallways and to the nurse's office. You knock on the door, and when a nice-looking woman in her thirties answers, give her an awkward wave and explain what's going on with you.

"You're running a fever," reports the nice school nurse lady after she ushers you into the sickbay and presses her hand briefly to your forehead, and, yeah, now that she mentions it, you do feel kind of feverish. It makes sense.

You think about how you'll be able to go home early now and – well, watch whatever's on TV, you guess. You've kind of lost track of what shows are on with all the Scorpia stuff happening, and then having to catch up on recovering from a gunshot, and the Drevin fiasco, and the Snakehead incident, and then having to be a functional human being and schoolwork and everything – it's just a lot. You think you might enjoy having the chance to be sick for a bit and to catch up on all the things you've missed – just not for too long, though. "Cool," you say.

"No, hot. Very hot," the nurse corrects, which makes you smile – not, like, _widely _or anything, but just a kind of thin smile to acknowledge the joke's existence. "Do you still feel like throwing up?"

You shake your head. The nausea's passed, receding from you like a tide. Your stomach still feels kind of tight and weird and pained, but you figure that's just from vomiting for like ten minutes straight. "I'm all right now. Maybe I ate something weird?"

"Hm. Maybe." The nurse eyes you critically, and then says, "I'm just gonna go call your parents, okay? Hopefully one of them can come pick you up."

"Guardian," you correct reflexively, "and yeah, she should be home."

The nurse nods, and goes for the phone, pulling up a page on her computer before dialling your home number and waiting. "Bed rest and fluids, probably the best thing for you now," she tells you cheerily as she waits for the call to connect, and then it does, and you're left waiting while she talks quickly and succinctly to Jack about what's going on with you. You don't mind, really, it's nice to have a moment of reprieve, even if it's in a tiny, badly-furnished medical office. You look at the nurse while she talks, and note to yourself that she seems nice and you should probably ask for her name, just to be polite – and then you dismiss it, because you'll probably never see her again.

The nurse finishes up the call, says, "all right, she'll be here in ten minutes," and then takes a minute to frown at the computer screen. "Hm – Alex, it says here you got your appendix removed a month or so ago?"

It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to connect the dots and remember your cover story. "Yeah. Took me out of school for, like, three weeks."

"Ooh, not fun," she says sympathetically. "Just checking, sometimes we get these things wrong on school records." She pauses to make a note. "Probably just a viral infection. Feel free to take a nap or something until your guardian arrives," she adds.

"All right," you say, and then you don't do that, because falling asleep, even lightly, in an area that you're relatively unfamiliar with makes you feel distinctly uncomfortable. If you're going to rest, you'd prefer to do it in your room, where you at least have the illusion of safety. You lie on the thin cot in the nurse's office with your eyes half-closed, and practice looking like you're asleep while you listen in carefully to what's going on in the staffroom right next to you. It never hurts to keep up on the latest gossip and news, no matter how seemingly irrelevant it might be. You learn about how the tenth-graders are driving Mr Morris up the wall, how the staff bathroom has somehow been locked shut from the inside despite nobody being in there, and about the inevitable seven affairs that all the teachers are having with each other. It's marginally more interesting than Double Maths was. Your head is pounding.

By the time that the nurse comes and knocks gently on the wall to 'wake you up', you're so ready to go that you're sitting up and pushing yourself off the cot before you can even remember to pretend to look like you're shaking off sleep. You follow her out to the carpark and yes, there's Jack, thank god. She sweeps you up with a hug and a frown, tells you that you look awful (she's right, but ouch.) and drives you home, where you stumble up to your room and spend a few hours just dozing. It's kind of peaceful, but also kind of not because your stomach still hurts with a dull throb like the distant constant pain of a knife driving into the flesh of someone who isn't quite you.

You feel the pain abate slightly over the course of the afternoon. Jack makes lasagne for dinner. You manage to eat some of it, and you curl up on the couch and watch Doctor Who reruns for two hours straight until you fall asleep on the couch.

Jack apparently didn't want to wake you – and knows better than to try to carry you upstairs, you'd probably kick her face in by accident – so you wake up the next day with several blankets draped over you and a pillow tucked between your head and the couch. There's a glass of water within easy reach. Your neck barely hurts at all. It's quite possible that you would die for Jack Starbright, given half the opportunity.

You sit up, and realize that you're feeling better. Not one hundred percent, but the headache's gone and your body only feels slightly sore. You've managed to function on far worse – this is practically the picture of perfect health, for you.

Jack grins when she sees you in the kitchen a short while later, slamming together some scrambled eggs on toast, and when she ruffles your hair affectionately, you only stick your tongue out at her a little. And right after you finish your breakfast, the house phone rings and Jack shoos you away from doing the dishes so you can go answer it.

"Hey, mate," says Tom, voice crackling in your ear, "you doing anything this morning?"

You look over at Jack. She's humming something to herself, there's a splash of washing-liquid foam on her nose. "Don't think so. Why, what is it?"

"Some of the others were planning on heading down to the park for a footy match," he says, carefully casual. "I was wondering if you wanted to tag along. You know. For a change in pace?"

You barely consider this for a second before you say, "yeah, sure – why not?" It's been entirely too long since you've hung out with friends. Or acquaintances. Or anybody non-MI6-related who's not been trying to kill you, really.

Tom gives you the address, and a time – about an hour from now – and you tell him you'll see him then and there, and you hang up. Jack makes a bit of a fuss over you going out – after all, you had to come home from school early yesterday, and had looked 'pretty damn sick, Alex, come on' – but your improved appearance and cheerful attitude seems to convince her. She mostly just looks glad that you're going to be hanging out with some kids your own age for once, and you can't blame her.

You catch a bus downtown, and find your way to the park that Tom had indicated. It's a wonderful day to be outside and not be involved in another one of MI6's plots or schemes. You feel free.

There's a group of maybe twenty-to-thirty kids, about your age, clustered along one side of the field – you feel like it's pretty safe to assume that you've found the place, especially when you catch sight of Tom in the midst of the crowd. You wave – he waves back – and you jog over to meet him. Tom grins, thumps you on the back. "All right, Alex?"

You laugh, shove him back, and let yourself be dragged into a round of introductions and people who you feel like you should know from school but have never really paid much attention to, and you remember all their names as they're presented to you, because your memory's perfect when it comes to facts like that. It's handy that way.

Eventually, someone finds the football they stuffed somewhere in the boot of their car, and a kid named Martin organizes – shepherds, more like – everyone into two roughly-even teams, and you end up on the shirts team, with Tom. Goals are hastily arranged with the resources available, and you begin to play.

You like playing football. You're good at it, even – _really _good. The combination of simple physical dexterity and basic strategy makes you a formidable opponent on the field, and after about ten minutes of kicking the ball around, the other boys on the field get so (jokingly) sick of your ridiculous ball-related stunts and plays that they demote you to goalkeeper, which makes for a much more interesting game for everyone involved. Plus, it means you don't have to run around quite so much, which is good, because that pain in your stomach is acting up again. You're enough – and have enough endurance in general – to just kind of plough straight on through the pain, shoving it to one side so you can just enjoy this one day out on the field with your friends, but it's much easier to do that if you have a few minutes here and there to lean against a tree and catch your breath occasionally. You refuse to drop out of the game altogether – that would just be proving that you can't commit to doing anything_ – again – _and besides, you're starting to feel better already. The fresh air is doing you good.

You manage to go for about an hour before you realize you really do have to take a step back, because you're getting tired. You feel super hot – even more hot than you should, given all the exercise – and you realize with an internal groan that your fever must be kicking up again. You wave to Tom, indicate that you're just going to sit out for a bit, and go to grab a Coke from the cooler that one of the other boys brought along. One of the others from your team swaps out with you for goalie without a second thought, and for a while you just watch the game progress, rubbing absently at your lower stomach. Everyone's so happy. These kids, most of whom you don't know at all – they're grinning and laughing and tackling each other, lost in the simple joy of playing a ragtag game of footy with their friends on a pleasant afternoon. A few minutes ago, you were part of that camaraderie, but the moment you'd swapped out, it was like you'd never even been playing with them at all.

Realistically, you know it's just because none of them know you that well, and typical teenage awkwardness prevents them from trying to get you involved more actively, but still – you can't pretend that it doesn't sting a little.

The afternoon sun beats down hard on the back of your head, and sweat trickles down your neck. You gulp down some more Coke and it's deliciously cool. Someone on the field makes a particularly daring play, and you cheer along with the rest of the kid's team, kicking your heels against the plastic of the cooler you're sitting on. You feel sick – more sick than yesterday – but you push it off like the minor inconvenience it is.

A few more minutes pass, and then another boy you don't know too well – Justin? Yes, that's his name – comes dashing up to you, and breathlessly requests that you rejoin as goalie, because they're quote unquote getting their arses thrashed and help us Alex Wan Kenobi, you're our only hope. Gratuitous Star Wars reference aside, you can hardly ignore a plaintive cry for help like that, so you decide to ignore something else instead – your body's loud internal complaining and the vague niggling thought that there might be something seriously wrong with you – and you jog onto the field, to scattered cheering and genuine delight, to resume your position in your team's makeshift goalposts. You acknowledge the excitement over your return with a laugh and feel something warm bubbling up in your chest – it's nice to be wanted. It's enough to distract you from the rising pain in your lower stomach for the next few minutes as play resumes once more. You easily defend the goal from a couple of not-altogether-skilful attacks, and then the game moves up to the other end of the field, and you have a moment to catch your breath once more. Your gaze wanders off to take in the rest of the park, for a quick distraction – a few kids playing on the jungle gym nearby, a bunch of older men sitting around a picnic table and chatting over coffee, some couple walking their dog – but no, the pain's getting worse. You decide that, yeah, enough is probably enough, and after the next goal, you're going to duck out of the game permanently and then get some proper rest.

But before you can think any more about that, the game's moving back in your direction, and you just kind of automatically fall back into a position ready to block the ball when it comes your way. People are yelling and laughing and calling for you to catch it, you can't just let them down.

The ball goes wide, and you dive sideways to grab it – and you instantly realize just how much of a bad idea that was. Your side explodes with pain, and you stumble and you fall, ploughing face-first into the grass. You may be screaming, but you're not entirely sure. You hope you aren't. You're pretty good at staying quiet in the face of horrifying agonizing pain; it'd be pretty stupid if you were losing it now over something like _this._

Your hearing's gone kind of weird for some reason, but you can still hear the chorus of good-natured laughter that follows your crash-and-burn and the thunk of the football as it hits the ground behind you. But it's faded - distant, like someone's dialled down the volume switch on the car radio on a busy, noisy highway – mostly, you can just hear the trucks whizzing past. Your head hurts. So does your stomach. It's throbbing and aching so much that you want to groan and whimper aloud, so you do, and that must be what alerts the others to the fact that there's something going on, because the next thing you know, someone's shaking your shoulders and saying, "Alex? Alex, can you hear me?" in an absolute panic.

You swat out at them inelegantly, and then curl in on yourself, trying to squeeze the pain into submission. It's not working. It's just getting worse and worse. You feel tears tracking down your cheeks, and you press your face into the dirt.

"Shit," says the someone – probably Tom, it sounds a lot like him, "_shit –_ someone call Jack!"

"Who's Jack?" says someone else.

"His housekeeper, she's – hey, someone give me their phone, _shit, _he looks bad –"

" – do you think we should call an ambulance?"

"– did you see him, he just _dropped, _christ –"

The commotion appears to be attracting a crowd, if the sound around you is anything to go by. There's voices you don't recognize – voices that sound a bit older than that of a teenager's.

"I'm a medic, out of the way," says someone, "what's the – oh, holy _shit_."

"_Alex?_" says someone else.

"Who's Alex –" says yet another person, and then there's a lot of confused shouting and talking from the rest of your classmates, and you kind of lose track of what's going on, and then there's hands on your shoulders, strong and grounding.

"Hey, hold still for a sec," says a soft, lightly accented voice, and then someone's heaving you up and propping you against something solid – gently lifting your eyelids and doing all sorts of clinically-tinged medical-seeming checks, and you just groan and let it happen because everything sucks and this person seems familiar somehow so it must be okay. A sigh, and then, "all right, gotta check your stomach. I'm going to pull up your shirt –"

Instinctively, you make a noise of objection and twist away from the voice. You shake yourself away from semi-consciousness, and pry open your eyelids again as curiosity and instincts overtake pain for a few seconds, and you see –

"Oh, fuck me running," you sigh, because the man crouching beside you is slight and blonde with a near-constant quirk to the side of his mouth, and his name (or codename, anyway) is Snake, and there are three other equally familiar men nearby, looking uncomfortable amongst the crowd of teenagers that are watching this situation anxiously, and it's just your goddamn luck that the entirety K-Unit of all people had to be in the park today, isn't it?

Snake laughs, although it doesn't really reach his eyes. There's something there that you can't quite place. "Good to see you too, Cub."

"Why – what – _how._" You struggle to sit up properly, and promptly collapse with a howl of pain.

"Well, the _what _is appendicitis," says Snake blandly, "I think. I'm not an expert, but –"

"Oh fuck that, you know exactly what you're talking about," you gasp out at him, because he's being a prick about this for no reason and everything hurts and you're sweating bullets and _K-Unit is here. _You can't tell if you're surprised or horrified – no, wait, you can – it's both. But mostly horrified. This is humiliating on every conceivable level.

"Just a sec." Snake brushes your forehead curtly with a hand, says, "high fever, check," and then jabs you sharply in the abdomen, right where the pain is worst, and it flares up a hundredfold. "Does that hurt?" he asks you, as you howl in pain, and swear at him again.

"You have a _filthy _tongue, Cub," says Eagle, coming forward, and nudging Snake with a foot to get his attention. "How bad?"

"Bad enough that he should've caught it days ago," Snake says, and you finally place that expression on his face, carefully masked by the curtness and the casual meanness. "Someone call a goddamned ambulance. I am not joking when I say he _might actually die_ if we don't get him to a hospital,_ stat_."

Tom waves his phone at them from somewhere in the crowd, indicating that he's on it, and you see him start to dial, moving away from everyone else so he can get some quiet or something.

Fox – Ben – well, never mind, as long as the rest of them are there, he's Fox – he falls neatly to the ground next to you, leaning against the tree you're propped up against. He gives you a wry, sort of worried sideways smile, but doesn't say anything. You're kind of glad to see _him_, despite everything. Fox is... cool. Both in a difficult situation, and as a person in general. He's probably one of maybe three adults that you'd be willing to contact in a difficult situation for reliable backup.

Up until now, you've barely remembered that the rest of the football teams were still there, but then they start talking and then it's hard to forget.

"Appendicitis?" someone from the crowd of your fellow classmates says. "But didn't he get that, like, a month ago? That makes no sense."

"How can you get appendicitis if your appendix is already removed?" someone else calls.

Fox shoots you a questioning glance, and you press your lips together, fighting back the pain.

"The appendix grew back," you say.

Snake nods solemnly at this, as if it's completely reasonable. "You heard the kid, his appendix grew back!" he calls out at the sceptical crowd. "And I'm a medical professional, so I know what I'm talking about – hey, where the hell's that ambulance?"

"Thought you weren't an expert," you mutter.

"Shut up, Cub," he says without malice, and pats you on the shoulder, standing up. "Hold on for a bit."

You jerk your head in a rough nod, and watch as he gets up and goes over to Tom and gestures; pointing at the phone. Tom says something to him, looking serious, and after a second, offers his phone up to him. You bring an arm up to your eyes and roughly scrub at them, wiping any tears away. You are right in front of the two groups that you least in the world want to see you in this particular vulnerable position.

"Hey, who are these guys?" asks someone you don't really know. You try to place his name, just out of something to do, but it's hard to concentrate over the stabbing, relentless pain. Starts with a G, you think. George? Probably George. "Alex – do you know them? Should we – get them to leave?" It's said with a considerable amount of uncertainty. Fair enough, you think. Getting an intimidating-looking unit of ex – current? You're not really sure – SAS soldiers to leave a helpless-looking kid alone isn't the easiest of tasks, even for a group of pumped-up teenage soccer players. You're kind of flattered that he's even considering it. Good thing it's probably not necessary.

"We know him." It's Wolf's turn to speak up. "We're his –" He sends a questioning glance in your direction, and you have to fight back a sort of hysterical laugh. Why is everyone in this unit so bad at making up cover stories on the spot? And why are they relying on you to provide the excuses? _You?_ Didn't Snake just say you might die if you didn't get to a hospital?

"Uncles," you offer.

Well, they asked for it.

You hear Fox, from somewhere next to you, muffle a choked laughed. Wolf makes an odd, uncharacteristic breathy noise, and then instantly collects himself. Eagle just nods and smiles and says, "yep. His uncles," because apparently he's the only one around here that understands the concept of proper improvisation and _just say yes. _

You don't know if it's very convincing, but at least the soccer teams aren't trying to jump K-Unit, so you count this as a win. Plus, plausible deniability is always handy.

Snake returns with Tom, and says, "ambulance ETA ten minutes." He looks over at the rest of the kids, and says, "you lot can clear off, now. We've got it from here."

There's some scattered protests, but then Wolf pulls himself up to his full, terrifying height and inflicts the Glare upon all of them, and they scatter like frightened geese, throwing glances over their shoulders at you. Well, most of them do.

"Everything all right, Alex?" Tom says, with more than a hint of tension in his voice and body.

"Just peachy," you say, and try not to move very much. At the look he's giving you, you relent, and say, "don't worry, these guys are – they're fine. We go back – a while."

"You go back a...?" Tom's giving you a suspicious look, and then he looks at the men clustered around the tree you're lying against, and something seems to click inside his head. "Wait a minute, you're – they called you Cub. _They're K-Unit?_"

You remember bitching about Brecon Beacons to Tom about a year ago, and wince. You had complained... extensively. Most of it had been pretty justified, but – "yeah, but – listen, they're fine now, I think."

"Cheers," says Fox dryly, just as Tom explodes with, "_they're the arseholes that kicked you backwards into a bomb when you were training with them!_"

There is a rather stunned silence.

"Technically," you say, "that was just Wolf. I'm pretty sure the others had nothing to do with that."

"You did _what –_" Fox begins.

"I apologized –" Wolf starts.

"You did _not,_" you accuse, and then double over in pain again. It's getting worse, but you manage to wrap your arms around yourself and squeeze so that it abates for a moment or two – enough that you can gasp out, "but also I pushed him out of a plane a few days later so it all evens out, maybe –"

Snake audibly winces, and says, "don't do that, Cub, come on," reaching out a hand towards you. You growl, and swipe him away, and then the stabbing pain kicks in and your vision goes white.

"Well. You did warn him," you hear Fox say, and then Snake's coaxing you roughly through some breathing exercises, and Tom's chipping in with worried commentary, and eventually you're brought back to as close as you can get to equilibrium at this point.

It's one of the weirdest experiences of your life, sitting in a park with your four ex-military unit members and your best friend keeping you awkward company while you all wait for an ambulance to arrive. You're in blinding pain the whole time, which means that you don't really have the opportunity to appreciate it fully. Here's what you manage to gather, broadly speaking: apparently, K-Unit is on temporary leave, and – coincidentally, so was Fox, so they had decided to spend the day out together. The fact that you had been in the same park was just complete coincidence.

By the time the ambulance arrives, you're barely conscious, and you can't entirely process the fact that Wolf's the one who scoops you up and carries you across the field like you weigh literally nothing. That's probably a good thing, because if you were fully aware, you would also be fully aware of just how humiliating the whole experience is. But to his credit, he doesn't say a word – condescending or otherwise.

It's about this point that you pass out properly.

When you wake up, you're in a hospital bedroom somewhere, which is a depressingly familiar sight at this point. Jack's at your bedside, reading some book with an intricate rose design on the cover. When she sees that you're up, she lowers the book and gives you a Look that's on par with any of Wolf's pointed stares. "You just can't stay out of trouble, can you?" she says.

You manage a smile. "Sorry," you say. You feel muzzy and kind of floaty too, and you know it's because you're on some serious pain medication, and you also know that the moment it wears off, you're going to be in some serious horrific agony. You think back over the last things you can remember, then peel back the bedsheets awkwardly to take a look at the surgery scars that you know are there – and, yep, there it is. The resulting scar's not quite as dramatic as the remnants of your encounter with the Scorpia sniper, but it's there and it's real, and – "people's appendixes don't usually grow back, do they?"

"No, they don't," Jack agrees. "We're going to have to come up with another excuse for why you're out of school for the next couple of days."

"Get MI6 onto it, this is at least partly their fault," you yawn.

Jack sighs, and then folds her arms, and – after an apparent brief internal struggle, says, "you were still feeling sick, weren't you?"

You debate lying for a split second, before realizing how pointless it would be. "...yeah. But only a bit. I thought I'd be fine, honestly."

"Honestly?"

"Honestly."

There's a pause, then –

"Right, then. So are you going to tell me why there's been four fully-grown men in the hallway outside your room being glared down by your best friend for the last few hours, or am I supposed to figure that out on my own?"

"Wait, they're-?"

"All waiting to see you, yeah."

It's hard to process the thought of this, mainly because it's just so _weird. _Tom, yeah, that makes sense – even though you feel kind of guilty that he apparently stayed at this hospital for hours waiting for you, and you know you're going to be happy to see him, but _K-Unit_? What could possibly be possessing them that they'd want to stay and see how you're doing? Is it out of obligation, or because Ben bullied them into doing it, or – something else? – even though you're not sure you fully want to think about what that something else is. The idea that someone else could care about you that hasn't known you for years and years on end – it's confusing. And terrifying.

"You up for visitors?" Jack asks you, glancing over at the door.

You think about it for a moment, and then shrug, trying to shove that mortifying terror of being known to the back of your mind and focus on the positives of this. If Tom's really actually managed to cow K-Unit into submission, you'll be impressed, and you kind of want to see what that looks like. "Sure, why not? Send them in."

Jack salutes playfully in your direction, and gets up, heading across to do just that. Just before she opens the door, she stops, and turns back to look at you. "Alex – don't do that to me ever again. Getting that call from Tom, I – I swear to god, my heart stopped for a full minute. I know you're fine, but..." She fumbles for a moment. "Take care of yourself. _Please._"

"Yeah," you say, knowing that it's almost certainly a lie. "Yeah, I'll try."

She looks at you like she knows what you're thinking, and then nods, slipping out of the room. Only minutes later, you hear voices from outside – Jack, and five others. Familiar voices.

And all you can do is take a deep breath and wait for them to come in.


End file.
